She was too inexperienced to recognize the gulf between frankness and effrontery, but he made her vaguely uneasy.  He knew so many things, and yet he was so obviously not quite a gentleman, in her family’s sense of the word.  He had a curious effect on her, too, one that she resented.  He made her insistently conscious of her sex.

And of his.  His very deference had something of restraint about it.  She thought, trying to drink her tea quietly, that he might be very terrible if he loved any one.  There was a sort of repressed fierceness behind his suavity.

But he interested her, and he was undeniably handsome, not in her father’s way but with high-colored, almost dramatic good looks.  There could be no doubt, too, that he was interested in her.  He rarely took his eyes off hers.  Afterwards she was to know well that bold possessive look of his.

It was just before they left that he said: 

“I am going to see you again, you know.  May I come in some afternoon?”

Lily had been foreseeing that for some moments, and she raised frank eyes to his.

“I am afraid not,” she said.  “You see, you are a friend of Mr. Doyle’s, and you must know that my people and Aunt Elinor’s husband are on bad terms.”

“What has that got to do with you and me?” Then he laughed.  “Might be unpleasant, I suppose.  But you go to the Doyles’.”

She was very earnest.

“My mother knows, but my grandfather wouldn’t permit it if he knew.”

“And you put up with that sort of thing?” He leaned closer to her.  “You are not a baby, you know.  But I will say you are a good sport to do it, anyhow.”

“I’m not very comfortable about it.”

“Bosh,” he said, abruptly.  “You go there as often as you can.  Elinor Doyle’s a lonely woman, and Jim is all right.  You pick your own friends, my child, and live your own life.  Every human being has that right.”

He helped her into a taxi at the door of the tea shop, giving her rather more assistance than she required, and then standing bare-headed in the March wind until the car had moved away.  Lily, sitting back in her corner, was both repelled and thrilled.  He was totally unlike the men she knew, those carefully repressed, conventional clean-cut boys, like Pink Denslow.  He was raw, vigorous and possibly brutal.  She did not quite like him, but she found herself thinking about him a great deal.

The old life was reaching out its friendly, idle hands toward her.  The next day Grace gave a luncheon for her at the house, a gay little affair of color, chatter and movement.  But Lily found herself with little to say.  Her year away had separated her from the small community of interest that bound the others together, and she wondered, listening to them in her sitting room later, what they would all talk about when they had exchanged their bits of gossip, their news of this man and that.  It would all be said so soon.  And what then?